By Massimo Prioro
Anti-gender politics doesn’t just attack rights. It attacks the knowledge that makes those rights intelligible. Massimo Prioro Argues that anti-gender politics is as much an epistemic conflict as a political one. This conflict creates political fatigue among feminists and researchers engaged in queer work. We must overcome such fatigue through distance, care and collective reflection
Across Europe and beyond, anti-gender actors increasingly portray gender studies, feminist research, and queer scholarship as ideals rather than science. Beyond curtailing rights, anti-gender discourses, mobilities, and policies target the ideas, practices, and communities that make gender and sexuality research possible.
Concepts such as gender, intersectionality, sexual orientation and gender identity are no longer just activist, institutional, academic or legal terms. Anti-gender actors now use these ideas in campaigns. They relate gender studies, queer theory, feminist research, and LGBTIQ+ scholarship to activism and social movements as threats to children, women, families, and freedom. Politicians, parties and moral entrepreneurs use these so-called threats as weapons, as they do Activists and academics appropriate radical feminist theory In anti-gender, anti-LGBTIQ+ and anti-trans terms.
Recognizing and Naming Political Fatigue
Studying gender politics as a scholar already describedWe face not only opposition to equality principles but an attack on the forms of knowledge that make these claims intelligible and possible. Epistemic conflicts concern what knowledge we have access to, who is excluded from it, and whose experiences are allowed to matter in public debate.
Such attacks challenge the authority to create and legitimize knowledge about gender and sexuality They also question whether concepts, ideas, and fields of study related to gender and sexuality are truly scientific. Critics label feminist and minority views as ideological, and illegitimate. Their goal is to replace feminist epistemology with new forms of religiously based but strategically secular epistemology or sex-based essentialism. Gender, family, race and citizenship become normal categories Government and law should be protected Against critical theory.
Where anti-gender politics have become institutionalized, gender researchers are no longer observing hostile fields from afar. Many scholars, activists and communities are also living it every day.
Where anti-gender politics has become institutionalized, many scholars are experiencing political fatigue
In September 2025, I gave the keynote address at its interim conference Sexuality Research Network of the European Sociological Association in Palermo In it, I described the consequences of such an attack Political fatigue. This exhaustion is not just the ‘ordinary’ exhaustion of the desperate material conditions scholars are forced to work in, and the precariousness of academic labour. Rather, fatigue is caused by the exhaustion of working in a public arena where critics are constant Questions and objectives Concepts, methods, research participants, and communities. The private lives of researchers have even become objects of public stigma and institutional attack.
The politics of distance
Faced with anti-gender discourse, a tempting response is to engage and debunk. And while this may indeed be a necessary step, it is probably not sufficient and not always necessary.
‘Gender ideology’ is not a scientific concept. We need to understand how this label works politically, who uses it, where it propagates, what it mobilizes, and what coalitions enable it. We also need to explore how it moves from churches to parliaments, from media campaigns to school boards, and from activist networks to governments and ministries.
Studying anti-gender politics requires distance from the emotions involved. Creating distance is a way of rejecting the terms of engagement imposed by anti-gender actors
But, anti-gender timesStudying anti-gender politics also requires distance. We need to distance our bodies and our research from the immediate emotional response provoked by the violence of anti-gender discourse. Remember that distance is not indifference. Rather, it is a way of rejecting the terms of engagement imposed by anti-gender actors.
Constantly responding to attacks, correcting distortions, and defending the legitimacy of one’s research field can lead to intellectual fire. By distancing ourselves, we can shift the analytical gaze from the attack to the conditions that make it possible and effective.
Maintaining conditions for research
The question for researchers is not just how to analyze this phenomenon. How to maintain the epistemic status that makes such analysis possible in the first place.
Studying anti-gender politics often means reading, hearing, and saving violent claims day after day. This means being drawn into the same public conflict one is trying to analyze. After ten years of my own research on anti-gender campaigns, maintaining analytical and physical distance has become not only an act of resistance, but increasingly a condition of survival. Collective reflection and mutual support Important for our field of research and for preserving our mental health.
In anti-gender times, it is a political responsibility to protect feminist and queer scholarship, and to ensure that institutions actively protect this research and those who produce it – both within and outside of academia.
Inhabiting feminist and queer scholarship
This is why feminist and queer research is even more necessary in anti-gender times knowledge production About vulnerable communities. This means taking responsibility for the circumstances in which we create knowledge and how that knowledge is performed. Scholars must defend individuals and communities whose lives have already faced public hatred. We must ask what visibility can do for us, these people and these communities
Each concept scholars use contributes to the context under which we debate gender and sexuality. So does every dataset we create and every public interpretation we offer. Together, they shape how social realities are made sense of.
Every concept we use contributes to the conditions under which we debate gender and sexuality. If we step back from the public debate, anti-gender actors gain more space
Silence also. As we step back from public debate, anti-gender actors gain more space to define ‘truth’ and ‘common sense’. Silence allows such actors to deny the concrete reality of gender identity, homophobia, or transphobia. Admitting this does not mean that scholars should be political actors. Rather, it highlights that academic knowledge is already shaping public debate. The question is not whether the research has political implications; Of course it does. rather, how scholars choose to engage with and deal with these influences.
Overcoming our political fatigue can strengthen our research, and enrich the public debate. It can help us demonstrate care for the people and communities we work with and for our research communities.
Taking responsibility, and overcoming political fatigue, transcends the boundaries of deontological duty. Defending feminist and queer scholarship is not only defending academic freedom, but also defending democracy. It is about preserving democratic conditions under which different forms of knowledge, experience and identity can become publicly visible and politically meaningful.
🌈 No.50 in a loop series on Gendering Democracy
this Article Originally published loop and republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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